Googling Your Lost Keys, And The Coming Revolution In Smart Products

Eventually your mountain bike could become a digital locker full of service history, receipts and photos of the amazing rides you’ve taken it on, writes Andy Hobsbawm. (image via Wikipedia)

Guest post by Andy Hobsbawm

Soon we won’t need to hunt anxiously for our missing shoes in the morning, we’ll Google them. So said tech visionary Bruce Sterling seven years ago, but if you look around your room right now and count the number of Internet-connected objects, you won’t find much beyond consumer electronics devices like laptops, phones and possibly your TV.

Why?

The pace of digital innovation is astonishing. It’s impossible to imagine life without the web, smartphones, social networks. And yet the consumer products and everyday objects all around us are still essentially dumb. Unconnected. Consumers are ready for a new age of smart products to close this gap between the physical and digital worlds.

It’s time for products to catch up and get online so we can access the kind of real-time, social web experiences we’ve come to expect in our daily lives. For our physical products to be as clever as Google, as immediate as Twitter, as informative as Wikipedia, as social as Facebook, as personal as Amazon and as entertaining as YouTube.

The good news is this is already starting to happen. For instance, Nike+ now has five million users connecting their trainers to the Web to compare running performances. And "Toyota Friend" which launched last year, is a plug-in hybrid car that emails or texts its owner when the engine needs to be re-charged or the tires changed (alerts that can be set to automatically update the owner’s social networks).

The principle that products are inherently more useful and desirable when they come super-charged with dynamic digital services will soon be applied across all categories.

This is partly because the technological building blocks required to deliver these kind of dynamic consumer services at scale -- WiFi and 3G broadband for instance, cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services, or connectivity technology like NFC chips, RFID and WiFi tags -- have now passed the tipping points in terms of cost. And new innovations such as printed circuit technology and the white space radio spectrum (transmitting data over unused TV channel airwaves as we switch from analogue to digital TV) are all helping to create a world where everything can talk to everything else, and everything to us.

But the real game-changer today is smartphones and the way they have transformed consumer interaction. Among many other things, a smartphone functions as a handheld digital sensor for the physical world. In other words, we don’t necessarily need our real world things to be directly connected, when the Web interface in our mobile devices provides the network access and intelligence. Smartphones can act as a hub, or microcosm of the web itself.

Increasingly, products will ship with ultra low-cost "smart tags" like NFC tags or even 2D barcodes, easily readable by smartphones. Some 5.3 million product barcode scans in June 2012 was the highest ever in a month – 120 such scans by consumers now happen every minute, a five-fold jump from last year. And 60% of phones in North America and Europe are expected to be NFC-compatible by 2016.

When you buy products like these, your first action will be to "check in" to it with your smartphone, identifying yourself using social APIs like Facebook, and thereby taking digital possession as well as physical ownership of the object. This activates a unique, addressable presence on the Web for that individual instance of that specific product, forever linked to its owner: it becomes "your" Nikon D90, instead of just "a" Nikon D90. This enables manufacturers and retailers to trigger a new digital world of personalized content, services, and apps, to let you interact with your physical product and get more out of using it.